We lived in a house with no running water on the side of a mountain in the Mojave Desert. I worked in Barstow 60 miles from home. My 2 sons were largely on their own. I got home from work one night and they presented me with a rattlesnake skin stretched out on a huge board. In the freezer was the rattlesnake, cleaned and rolled up in a freezer bag. "For dinner!" they cried...We moved a lot in those days and almost the only thing we ever took with us was our refrigerator which we'd load into the back of our overheated hatchback. The snake went everywhere with us shoved further into the back of the freezer. Three years later we lived in a little dump behind a feed store. I got home from work to find our neighbor, Elsie at the stove, the rattlesnake in a baking pan, covered with tomato sauce and we finally had our meal...
3 comments:
Okay, so you ate the snake, but what happened to the skin?
Killing that snake was like some sort of initiation rite. It took about 2 hours to stone the viper to death. I think we carried the frozen body around with us because we were afraid to eat it. Somebody scared us by saying when a snake is in that position, it will bite itself to die rather than die at the hand of killers. We thought the meat was poisoned.
Cool story...hopefully one of these days we can sit around and swap those snake stories..stan was bitten by a rattlesnake in the mountains of colorado..he was 27yrs old??? yeah, he survived..haha..has quite the scar..he was bit on the skin between thumb and 1st finger..the snake had just lost its skin so he thought it was a gardner snake..good story..weeks in the hospital..then got anti venom poisoning..another good story
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